Remote control of a variety of types of devices has become commonplace technology during the last decades. Well known examples include audiovisual devices, such as televisions and disc players. Many more devices can be configured for being remotely controllable, including doors and curtains.
A specifically interesting area of remotely controllable devices relates to illumination sources.
Light design is an art and, as such, it relies on the creativity of a user or light designer. This process cannot be substituted by electronic means, but largely depends on the creativity and knowledge of the user or light designer.
The ideation phase, during which the light scene is created in the mind and in the plans of the user or designer, is followed by the installation phase when the light infrastructure comprising illumination sources is put in place. Finally the mapping phase comes, during which the user or light designer ports the planned light scene or lightconcepts into the physical infrastructure. This is a critically important phase since it represents the bridge between the ideation of the user or designer and user or customer fruition.
Nowadays, the mapping takes place by means of the light user operating complex control panels that give access to all the devices (i.e. illumination sources) installed in the light infrastructure.
The mapping performed with the currently available tools is a very cumbersome task. A typical illumination infrastructure comprises at least ten illumination sources. In fact, the user or light designer has imagined the light scenes in terms of spaces and illumination, but all it has under control is a control panel full of a large number of (digital, if implemented in software) levers. The interaction with the light scene is not intuitive, since first of all the mapping between the knobs and the illumination sources is not directly clear and has to be figured out. Also, it is hard to judge the impact of changing the setting of one of the buttons, when standing at the fixed control position, since the impact from different sides might be quite different.